Posted
by
CmdrTacoon Wednesday October 11, 2006 @09:52AM
from the well-thats-good-for-them-then-isn't-it dept.

An anonymous person noted that "Intel Corporation, the $39-billion largest chip maker in the world, is developing new chip designs and processors at its India development centre to roll out the next generation of notebooks and servers, says a top company official."

No, they have to worry about people faking expenses and simulating work that has not been done instead. At least this [theregister.co.uk] was the result of the previous Indian design effort. If it was not for unauthorised Israeli skunkworks that became the Core series Intel would have been in really deep shit now. I guess that they have not learned their lesson yet.

Way to go Mate!! Hear hear for the misinformation.In India, a few categories of business expense reimbursements (called "fringe benefits" under the India Tax law) paid by employer to employee are tax exempt. These include things like business related travel expenses, costs associated with having a telephone at home, conveyance, and over-the-counter medicine, house rent etc. Each category has an amount limit, but more importantly, they employee is supposed to submit receipts of these expenses to the employer

a great example of how capitalistic free open market with lots of competition can bite us in the ass.

You have to understand no one has ever seen free trade before. Assuming it ever existed, that must have been a long time ago. Today there are taxes, tariffs, government-granted monopolies, and government regulation, which are all contrary to Free (as in freedom) trade.

So the problem isn't the free market, it's two things: First, it's not really a free market; and second, the fact that we had even less free trade for a long, long time means that there will be a period of settling out that, yes, will likely be disastrous for the US. Our economy is based on trade not being Free, because it has been that way for generations. The longer a flawed system is perpetuated, the longer it takes to correct the situation.

Add to the top of this situation the fact that the US has put a lot of effort into keeping other nations down, and you have a serious problem for this country. If those nations had been allowed to grow, they might not be such a threat today; but because people there have nothing, they will work for little more than nothing...

So the problem isn't the free market, it's two things: First, it's not really a free market; and second, the fact that we had even less free trade for a long, long time means that there will be a period of settling out that, yes, will likely be disastrous for the US. Our economy is based on trade not being Free, because it has been that way for generations. The longer a flawed system is perpetuated, the longer it takes to correct the situation.

Good point, first of all. But secondly- if a system has worked for generations, why is it suddenly flawed now? And if it's not really flawed, why "fix" a working system?

Well, keep in mind that IANAEconomist but it's not that it's suddenly flawed, it's always been flawed. The flaw is that it creates artificial imbalances which cannot be perpetuated indefinitely.

There are two reasons for this. One is simply that differentials are where the greatest energy exists. You can see this principle of nature at work everywhere you look. Energy has the property that it affects things, which I realize is an understatement but is part of the logical flow of this conversation... But anyway, what I mean by this is that there will constantly be forces working against it, so that it takes a great deal of effort to maintain it. That effort typically takes the form of regulation - but one of the effects of regulation is that it always creates imbalances of its own, which leads to more regulation. It's a self-perpetuating system, which is why trying to change the system from within is typically fruitless. Just in order to enter the system, you become a part of it. The other reason is that if we really did successfully wall ourselves in, then the rest of the world would just find a way to function without us. This is pretty much what's happening now - e.g. China's currency is no longer based on ours.

So basically, it was a doomed system from the beginning - this doesn't mean it wasn't useful then, it allowed us unparalleled economic growth. But it should have been abandoned when it was no longer useful and started to work against us, and it was not discarded only because certain individuals in power could profit from the status quo.

The attitude that you can get everything you want without helping others is a ridiculous one. The more you have, and the less others have, the more motivated they are to take away what you have. If you help yourself by helping others, then there is little reason for them to try to deprive you of anything. This has never been proven on a global scale because it has never been tried on a global scale.

Why not just be satisfied with what you NEED rather than what you WANT, and limit your population to fit within the carrying capacity of your territory?

Two reasons: One, we're human. We want more than what we need. Two, there are external forces. Others will come into your territory, etc.

There's no reason not to have more than what you need. There is reason not to have more than the planet to sustain. So I Guess there could be a reason - if we're over our carrying capacity. But then the only solution

lets thank all our elected republicans for helping out the middle class families out there/end sarcasm..|..

Traditionally, Republicans have been protectionist. Free-trade Republicans are a new breed. There are also free-trade Democrats.

a great example of how capitalistic free open market with lots of competition can bite us in the ass.
sure its great to have competition, unfortunately one way to be competitive is to reduce your expenses(costs).
overseas is cheaper then the u.s., so everything is moved overseas to help reduce costs, increase profits,
and potentially be more competitive since you will have more flexibility in your prices.

This is a good thing.

goodbye american jobs

Not true. Granted, if an Indian engineer can design a circuit for $15 an hour and an American won't work for less than $50, the American is going to lose his job to the Indian.

However, free trade also creates jobs, especially in my home state of Wisconsin. With tariffs and other protections removed that make offsourcing and exporting possible, our dairy industry now sells a great deal overseas. This is especially true for the smaller farmers - they didn't have the infrastructure the corporate farms did to effectively deal with trade barriers; now, they have a market to sell to that they didn't before.

Trade works both ways. American engineers may lose jobs in the short run, but everyone who uses a computer will benefit from cheaper microprocessor prices. European farmers may lose jobs, but the EU gets cheaper milk. Although it sure sucks to be the Engineer, the offshoring, in effect, made the rest of the world richer - if everything costs less, you can buy more than you could before, even though you don't make any more money.

Free trade isn't as simple as "goodbye American jobs" - it's a choice between protecting a few industries or seeing a widespread reduction in the price of, well, everything.

However, free trade also creates jobs, especially in my home state of Wisconsin. With tariffs and other protections removed that make offsourcing and exporting possible, our dairy industry now sells a great deal overseas. This is especially true for the smaller farmers - they didn't have the infrastructure the corporate farms did to effectively deal with trade barriers; now, they have a market to sell to that they didn't before.

This seems to me to be a huge negative from a few different angles.1. Energy usage- is it really a good thing to be selling parishable dairy products a half a world away at all, essentially creating huge multinational corporations, where millions of local dairies served before and created a fresher product for the mere reason that it didn't have to travel hundreds or thousands of miles to get to you?2. If we're selling dairy overseas, what is happening to local dairies overseas? Are they losing their market to US Government subsidised dairy products?3. And what happens to those overseas dairy farmers? Do they end up coming here to compete with us for land and resources (by coming here illegally, as the Oxacan Chicano Indians did when the same thing happened in Mexico) or by committing suicide (as farmers in India are doing)?

So can we look forward to the new Intel Ganges, Hoogly and Yamuna processors?

Well actually, I think they are just laying the ground work for future Indian companies that will compete with them in the processor sector. I'm not saying that this is bad, just that Intel, and others, are not going to be able to leverage low wages indefinitely and they may well be opening the vault of their family jewels. Someday in the not too distant future, the PC may have Ganges Inside!

This seems unfortunate to me. Other than people from India, the world's top minds simply don't want to live in India. This means that the chips will be designed almost exclusively by people from India. There is no lack of intellect in India. However, a monocultural design team was fine back in the days of the 8086 when a small team or even an individual could design a microprocessor, but nowadays you need extremely large groups of people working in concert. When all of these people have the same background, you stifle innovation. Why Intel is willing to limit innovation by essentially ignoring Europe, the Americas, the Middle East, and the rest of Asia is hard to speculate, unless they really and truly believe this is a cost saving measure. It seems odd, though, to attempt to save money in R&D rather than in production and support. It seems an R&D laboratory in Switzerland, for example, would make more sense if they are hoping to attract top talent.

But this does begs a different question. Why is outsourcing development to Israel any different than outsourcing it to India?

Don't get me wrong. I live in Israel, and I have nothing against seeing some of this money staying here. It's just that, putting on American goggles, I don't see how it makes any difference where money not spent in the US is spent. Is it that Israel is already a "R&D center", and therefor not a "new threat"?

There's a simple answer, and it's not about white and brown.Israel has a high standard of living in the ballpark of European and North American nations. Opening up a development plant in Israel, or Germany, or Ireland is not thought of as "outsourcing" because there is not a (significant) cost savings versus American employees, it's simply a matter of going to where the talent is. Outsourcing to India or China, on the other hand, is seen as a pure cost move because of those nations' considerable cost diff

I wonder how much of this projected inovation is the result of a renewed effort, spurred by AMD's earlier challenges. I really hope that AMD keeps competing at the same level, otherwise, we'll see prices go right back up again, and definitely more of Intel's cheesy marketing.

"is working on new chipsets for the small form-factor notebook...Validation work on server processors 5300 and 7100"

As much as I'd love India to lose the cheap indian labour [dotgnu.info] tag and actually find its place in the R&D world - this could be summed up as premature ejaculation. Validation work (aka quality assurance) is not really what I'd consider worthy of mention, but
chipsets are indeed a step forward - if indeed they are being designed here, not merely run through QA.

People here are comparitively cheap, but that does not automatically mean that "You get what you pay for",
unless you do shop around for a bargain.

Why does validation get a bad rap these days? With the growing size and complexity of chips, validation is a much more daunting task than ever. I work in pre-silicon verification at Intel, and in my opinion, the most senior engineers should be the ones doing the verification. Any junior engineer can pretty much take a spec written by an architect and code the RTL. Sure a junior engineer may have to rework some areas once timing analysis comes back, but in general RTL design is not that complicated of a

I would like to point out that your ideas about validation are pretty wrong. Hardware verification is not quality assurance. It is a complete and difficult part of hardware development apart from the fact that it also is a rather difficult subject in engineering. Think of traversing all simple paths in of a really really huge graph and making sure all paths work perfectly. That is just a trivial description of the problem. It also requires a deep understanding of the functionality that the RTL is out to deliver. This is not testing/validation as is thought of by us in the software world.

Weren't the latest round of Intel chips (Conroe, Woodcrest, Merom) developed by Intel's Israel development center? So why is it news that they're having their Indian branch work on some newer things? I thought that was the entire point of creating development centers in various places around the globe...

Companies with their head screwed on use multiple countries for 24/7 development and/or support. US works on code, goes home, code handed over to Phillipines, they work on it, hand it on to Eastern Europe, they do their bit then it goes back to the US.

It would be great if the new cheap were designed with operating systems and end users in mind.
There is a number of things that would be much better if the CPU supported some special instruction. Every OS class student has been tought this.
Unluckily, most of the new features will certainly be focused on DRM and other copyright enforcement technology!

It would be great if the new cheap were designed with operating systems and end users in mind.There is a number of things that would be much better if the CPU supported some special instruction. Every OS class student has been tought this.

Such as? Users get the virtualization instruction and SSE3. Do you have more special instructions in mind?

There is a number of things that would be much better if the CPU supported some special instruction. Every OS class student has been tought this.

I was taught that special instructions were a waste of time as 95% percent of the chips time was spent on the simplist operations such as load/store, logic and simple arithmetic. Hence the RISC chipset.

Perhaps the situation has changed now that compilers are a little more sophisticated. I say a little. SIMD is nice for intensive applications like encoders and numbe

Isn't the whole "outsourcing to India" tagline a bit tired? I would expect companies like Intel to put their R&D where it's the cheapest. After all, this can constiute up to 40% of a product's cost (and possibly more with a company like Intel that is so heavily based on new hardware technologies). If India lets them bring it down to 20 or 25%, their investors are the winners and they can continue to be competitive. One more notch in the chain of possible US job losses? Yes. A smart business move? Probab

...to happen as long as the Free Trade Agreements remain unfair to the American Citizen while providing gangbuster profits for the American and Foreign owned corporation.
These Trade Agreements need to be looked at again and readjusted into Fair Trade Agreements. These need to be setup to provide some sort of protections for the foreign workers and demand an equal or better environmental protection system, similar to what the US has.

Wow, you really do want to go to GITMO, don't you? Proposing that "the People" reassume control of the US is a very risky position to take. Right now, most of "the People" are doing well enough to not think there is a problem.

Actually, I agree with you. What you propose (Fair Trade vs. Free Trade) is what the European Union has done. There are very specific criteria for membership; items such as worker and environmental protections are included. Here's the wikipedia entry on the criteria - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copenhagen_criteria [wikipedia.org].

Unfortunately, the US has embraced the "Race to the Bottom" approach and we now can see the results. Globalization is a mixed blessing; on the one hand it does raise GDP for participating nations, but on the other hand, it can have serious repercussions. Of course, I'm expecting to be flamed and modded down now for attempting to be truly "fair and balanced".

Actually, I was expecting to be flamed more than modded down, but so far neither has happened (unless your post is a flame). Pointing out that both sides of an issue has merits and shortcomings is a great way of having supporters from both sides turn on you.

OTOH, "fair" trade isn't necessarily a good idea for the people it supposedly helps. Part of the reason the developing world gets so many jobs is because the labor there is cheap. They don't have the infrastructure, they aren't particularly close to the big developed world markets, and their legal systems can be quite messed up. So they often don't have much to attract a business. IMHO, they often get work only because they can work in sweat shops and be exploited as cheap labor. Fair trade is a great deal

Who's fault is that?
The problem is that in the developing world there is a massive rift between those that have and those that don't have.

This has created a system, wherein the Haves easily and consistantly take advantage of and hold down the aspirations of the Have Not. By forcing the Haves into providing more equity to the Have Nots, two things will happen. One, working conditions and compensation will increase for the works. Two, more equitable trade agreements will be for

One thing about the whole Indian outsourcing thing that people don't mention is that companies are increasingly going overseas not for the cheap labor, but for the talent. Remember, wage pressure in India and other outsourcing destinations is increasing, and pretty soon it won't be too much cheaper to do the work overseas.

The problem we have now is that fewer people are going into technical fields. We're a nation of CEOs, project managers, liaisons, coordinators, and other non-technical people. I've noticed a lot of people in the tech field encouraging their kids not to pursue any sort of science or engineering education. That's not a shocker. First of all, going to law school or getting an MBA guarantees you a lifetime of high income. Scientists/engineers are begging for jobs, and IT types are not finding as many entry-level positions that would get them entry into the field. Second, if you do decide to pursue something technical, the jobs are not guaranteed to be there. Why beat yourself up going for an engineering degree if someone on the other side of the world will work cheaper and do a better job than you could?

Also, the work ethic and education standard in other countries is much higher. I've worked with Indian outsourcing firms, and they make up for their lack of understanding of the problem with 14 hour work days and no complaints about how low their pay is. Compare that to workers in the US, who waste their whole day grumbling about their pay and are completely lazy.

Honestly, I don't know how to fix this. If we could somehow ensure that there would still be work available for those of us who like doing technical stuff, that would help.

I'm sorry, but when I call NetGear tech support, and the guy on the other side can barely speak the language, plus has no idea what a TCP/IP port number is, it doesn't really matter if he works 24 hour days, I'm still gonna be pissed. It also doesn't speak too well for the "talent" in India.

Also, working 14 hour days doesn't mean they're not lazy. It just means they work 14 hour days. You can pack a lot of goofing-off time into 14 hours.

I've worked with Indian outsourcing firms, and they make up for their lack of understanding of the problem with 14 hour work days and no complaints about how low their pay is. Compare that to workers in the US, who waste their whole day grumbling about their pay and are completely lazy.

Hang on there! Sure, this is why Indian labor is competitive with US labor-- but you make it sound like the US is just a bunch of lazy fatcats. I'm not an economist, but US productivity has been on the rise for a long ti

"Also, the work ethic and education standard in other countries is much higher. I've worked with Indian outsourcing firms, and they make up for their lack of understanding of the problem with 14 hour work days and no complaints about how low their pay is."

You must be a manager. Do you honestly want to work 14 hours a day for most of you waking life? I don't. Any sane person who want's some kind of life outside work doesn't either.

"Compare that to workers in the US, who waste their whole day grumbling about their pay and are completely lazy."

No, workers in the US just want a higher standard of living where they work to live, not live to work. The crazy ass-tastic practices the desperate people or crazy workaholic cultures around the globe that business people love fail to see the consequences of working too much.

This pro-workaholic attitude is part and parcel of the reason of why so many peoples lives are go down the shitter in depression, suicide and worse. More homework, more time in school, more time at work, etc, etc.

> They also make up for their lack of understanding of your> problem when you call a customer support line outsourced> to India and it takes 14 hours on the phone to get your> issue solved.This is more a problem with the company in question rather then Indians. For example I was taught by an Indian in India (via internet) for my SCJP1.4 exam (Whizlabs). The guy knew his stuff inside and out and was an exceptional teacher. By the same regards we have Indian SW engineers working with us in India a

"Dell is generally the main example of poor indian tech support. I suspect they are buying from the bottom of the barrel when it comes support home users."I would like to add that this is not limited to outsourcing to foreign agencies. I used to work in tech support for one of the major PC manufacturers (not Dell) in a call center populated with some of the brightest and most ethical individuals. We were paid well, had great benefits (3 weeks of vacation time) and loved our jobs and our customers.

...maybe people will start to take notice.India has dozens of http://www.indianmba.com/Top_B-Schools/top_b-schoo ls.html [indianmba.com] and it seems likely that at least some of them are able to teach students how to pigeonhole things as dogs, stars, problem childs, and cash cows... or whatever it is that MBAs are taught how to do.

It also seems likely that Indian MBAs on site are at least as capable of managing colleagues as U. S. MBAs a satellite-link away.

That's it. I'm against outsourcing. I don't like India. I believe what goes around comes around. As far as Intel goes:I'll never buy another Intel Processor again! I encourage all of you to do the same.

let see.1) still has the black death2) incredible amount of people sleeping on the streets.3) incredible amount of dead people on the street every morning.4) draconian religous laws.5)no protection for the citizens.here the first 5 reason why I don't like india, and will never go there.

Note, this is about India, not the people from there. Most of the ones I have worked with are bright and work hard during there shift.I also note that they have been educated in the US.

Anything involving chip design depends heavily not just on your patent portfolio, but on accumulating a set of minds with deep experience. Yes, you need to keep bringing in fresh genius; but you also need to retain the old, both for its continued insights and to help cultivate the new talent. So if Intel is really shipping out any of its major chip design work (as compared to testing, where the more different angles you test from the better - and which may really be all that's involved here), that's a sign that it currently values its accumulated "live capital" - its stock of engineering geniuses - low enough that it figures it might as well start over again with virgin staff elsewhere.

Now, there can be reasons for that. The American car makers are crashing because they should have fired their engineering staffs a couple of decades ago and simply started over. But has Intel really reached a similar point?

Intel's problems are not and have never been in the implementation of processor architecture. Their problems have always been their grandiose instruction set and architectural fantasies, and the degree to which they've let their plans be guided by currently-popular acadedmic theories.80286 segmentation was at least partly informed by the design of PL/1 and Pascal.

iApx432 was the super-CISC designed to deal with object-orientation at the hardware level.

Is it just unrealistic to believe that the work could be performed in the United States? Or is it a moot point anyway because (as humourously pointed out in another thread) the people working on it in that case would be Indians with work visas?

I'm not sure whether I think of this as good or bad, but corporations are spreading ALL of their pieces around the world. They don't want to be dependent on any country in particular. (It's hard to blame them for THAT attitude!) This will, inevitably, mean that their costs and benefits are also distributed. One of the benefits is jobs.This is a clear argument that corporations should not be given legal advantages in excess of the net benefits they provide, but that was reasonably clear already. (I coun

You won't be pointing and laughing when your employer moves your job overseas.And no one but you is going to be pointing and laughing at people for supporting their own country. But plenty of people are pointing and shaking their heads at you and your "profits over people" mentality. There's no future in that. There's short term gain, but no future.

Remember, you have to live in the country whose workers are impoverished. But when the impoverishment gets bad enough, of course, you'll move. That's your loyalt

Have you thought of the possibility that Intel might be having a hard time finding the skilled workers they need for chip development in the US? I've interned for a tech company in Silicon Valley, and a large portion of the chip designers were immigrants. I'm sure any company would be happy to hire locallly, since they don't have to pay for all the immigration stuff.

they're laying off skilled workers at the US plants, some of whom were American?Chip designer offshoring was what started first; my first degree was going to be Computer Engineering when there was a slowdown in 1995. I switched to MIS, and so did a lot of other people, as a result of this, not as a precipitation of this.

Here's how it goes:1) Companies lay off engineers in America and go overseas2) Engineering students change majors and new students don't take computer engineering as a major3) Companies hire

The unspoken side is that the MOST overpaid jobs are not the R&D, but the executives.

Obviously as you offshore the workers, you end up offshoring the first-line managers next. At some point, it becomes sensible to offshore some second-line managers, and so on. This continues up the chain, until those left see the logical conclusion, circle the wagons, and say, "It doesn't make financial sense to offshore any higher-level jobs." Or course they mean, "financial sense for me" to offshore higher-level jobs.

But by this time, there will be a lot of experience - some of it quite high-level, walking around the streets of India, which another post has suggested has more of a revolving door than Silicon Valley in its heyday. So how long before fully Indian semiconductor companies emerge? They won't have the Intel name, but that isn't as important outside the US and Europe, especially at a much lower price.

Once we've offshored every aspect of technical operation, what's left? Is the corner office really that valuable, especially outside the US?

Now you know how 90% of the world feels about the bottom 2% of America.

People like you amaze me. You live in a country where even the poor can own a fridge, car, TV, etc. yet you still bitch about others being richer than you. The poorest person in your country would be considered middle-class in most of the rest of the world, yet what's important to you is that the mythical 2% "are, like, REALLY rich". I know communism is still alive....I just hate seeing it on our shores. Keep it confined to Cuba.

It's not about "stepping up your game," it's about lowering your standards of living. I very much doubt that if a $125K/year engineer would keep his job if he starts working harder. They can hire 4 or 5 engineers in India for that price. And unless the American engineer can do the job of 4 or 5 people, he's out of luck.

"it's about lowering your standards of living."A large part of what you call 'standards of living' is actually everything ranging from state military spending through pharmaceutical patent regimes and other 'intellectual property'.

How do you expect a US worker to be able to remain competetive, when you look at what he actually has to finance?

"And unless the American engineer can do the job of 4 or 5 people, he's out of luck."

Yes, well, the trouble is, that engineer probably is doing the job of 4 or 5 people

This is the exact mentality that will continue to hurt the US in the future. Before globalization was significant, US was on top of the world. Now instead of stepping up their game, Americans concentrate on protecting their jobs.

There is no game to step up any more.

There's no point in getting a college degree in any technological field because even DOCTORS are vulnerable to tele-surgery.

America is shedding its high tech education base because there's fewer and fewer jobs for high tech educated people.

Overproduction created an economy that can only be kept alive by artificially stimulated demand?One of the major premeses of The Communist Manifesto was that the overproduction caused by industrialization required imperialism, to forcibly open new markets.

Heck, I'm anxiously awaiting massive economic corrections! It would cut down the supply of immigrants, because they wouldn't be getting a richer life anymore, and this would force the government to employ a payment system enouraging at least replacement level birthrate. This would be more in tune with my biological interests than having a bourgouise economy, bring it on!Not to mention, I'd be far more fullfilled in a more visceral culture, free from the distasteful luxuries of bleeding heartisms and general

What you may not realize is that 1/3 of a typical US salary is quite a nice living for someone in India

Hell, 1/3 of a typical silicon valley engineers salary is a decent living in about 80% of the US (by land area, not by population). You'd be suprised what $50-$60k will get you outside of the insane market-peak areas of the US.

So, people are not happy when foreigners get H1 visas and come to work here.

People are not happy when companies set up shop there so they (damn foreigners) don't have to come here. Obviously, if its not America or American, it has to be inferior. And obviously, why would any talented Indian chose to live and work in India?

All Indians in India are just F class engineers and the good ones are already here. Mind you, we still hate them, but still, we have the best ones.

The most recent Intel chips were all designed in Israel. Considering the volatile situation in that part of the world, it makes sense to move some of their assets away from there (one well-places Hezbollah rocket could cost Intel a huge amount).

This isn't about moving American jobs overseas. The jobs left America ages ago.